Before 2001, the assumed cycle was two years. Sources said last week that the 90-nanometer node has come in at just over two years.

“A big issue during the formulation of the 2003 ITRS was whether 2003 or 2004 would be the 'year of production' for the 90-nm technology node,” said Robert Doering, a senior fellow at Texas Instruments Inc. who is one of three representatives of the North American region to the road map committee. Juri Matisoo of the SIA and Paolo Gargini of Intel Corp. also represent North America.

“The conclusion was to leave it in 2004 — a return [for the second edition in a row] to a rounded three-year-per-node pace. Of course, this does not indicate any abrupt transition in the rate of technology development,” Doering added. “The rate of progress continues to evolve somewhere between two and three years.”

The road map defines “product shipment” as when an initial company first exceeds 10,000 units per month from a manufacturing site using “production tooling.” A second company must begin production within three months. Paolo Gargini, an Intel executive who chairs the ITRS committee, said the 90-nm node didn't miss by much.

“We had one company in [90-nm] production in the fourth quarter of 2003,” Gargini said in a telephone interview. “The second company came in during the first quarter of 2004, so we missed being within a two-year cycle by one quarter. Instead of two years, it was two and one-quarter or maybe two and one-half years” between the 130-nm and 90-nm nodes, he said.

Hans Stork, newly promoted to the chief technology officer role at Texas Instruments (Dallas), said the industry remains “very close to being on a two-year cycle.”

“Given the deep recession that we are coming out of, I think it is remarkable that we are only one or two quarters later than expected with 90-nm production. As long as we see the benefits from both a technology as well as a product competitiveness view, we will continue to keep scaling on roughly a two-year cycle.”

Nevertheless, the executive summary of the 2003 edition includes a statement that “the present consensus projects a three-year cycle for DRAM interconnect half-pitch nodes throughout the 2003 to 2018 life of the current road map.”

The road map became available to the public in mid-December. A printed version and related products in compact-disk form will become available later this quarter, as well as related products in compact disk form, said Linda Wilson, an International Sematech staffer who serves as managing editor of the ITRS.

By: DocMemory
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